Individual readings are available for purchase at Aster & Ash.

It’s August 8th, and today marks the peak of the Lions Gate portal, so I wanted to do a reading for it and see how it works with our broader theme this month, which is a return to self.

The message itself that came through is simple, and it’s basically what we’ve already been looking at. When we think about the Lions Gate portal, everyone’s thinking about manifestation, right? Well, with this reading, the message is that power is not always going to be a matter of pushing harder, carrying more, or proving that we can survive the weight of the world and still make it look like we’re managing and surviving well. I know I’m not. I think that when it comes to manifestation, we need to remember that it’s not about trying to force things.

Sometimes personal power begins when we notice that there are things that were never ours to carry. Ruminating on our pasts, looking back on that spiral path, looking back to my earlier writings, some of these things were never ours to carry. They were put on us by others. They were put on us by society, by culture, and by our families, and there was some serious shit. So, we need to look at that and figure out what we need to set down because it’s not our fucking business to be carrying it. The reality is, if we don’t, chances are it’s going to circle back like a bad fucking ex who wants you to make them a sandwich and continue that emotional labor that they don’t deserve.

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There are times when I find myself wanting to get back to who I was before. The person I was before the exhaustion, the grief, and the disappointment. Before I’d spent so long in survival mode that survival started to be my personality.

I don’t think I’m alone in that. We talk all the time about finding ourselves again, getting back to ourselves, or returning to the person we used to be. Usually, there’s some imagined version of the self waiting in the past. She’s still alive in there somewhere, apparently. Untouched and uncomplicated. Before the job, the relationship, the illness, the loss, the trauma, the children, the caretaking, the compromises, the bills, or whatever else happened to us.

I feel this longing intimately. When you feel estranged from your own life, the past can look like the place where something important was left behind. Yet returning to the self doesn’t require going backward.

I’m not convinced there is a pristine original self buried beneath everything that has happened. I’m suspicious of any spiritual framework that treats lived experience as contamination, purity as the goal, or human beings as inherently defective. We are shaped by what we survive, love, lose, refuse, and eventually learn to recognize. Some of those changes become discernment; some remain injuries; others are adaptations that were once useful and now suffocate us. They don’t submit easily to neat categories. Life is messy, at times horrendous and, I hope in greater measure, joyful—although much of it seems to be spent in the less dramatic territory of uncertainty and disorientation.

The question, then, is not “How do I get back to who I was?” but “What is still mine beneath everything I have had to become in order to survive?” That question asks us to consider the past, describe the present accurately, and look toward the future. It is not a reversal. It is a movement along a spiral path.

The Resilience Problem

Before I get too far into the spiral, though, I need to talk about resilience. People have spent years complimenting women like me on our resilience, and I’m so fucking sick and tired of it.

“You’re so resilient.”

“I don’t know how you keep bouncing back.”

“I wish I had your strength.”

I know people usually mean well. Sometimes the phrase is offered with genuine tenderness: an attempt to acknowledge what you have survived and the fact that you are still standing. It is often an uninformed way of saying, “I see you.” Whatever the intention, I have come to fucking hate it.

I didn’t want to become resilient. I didn’t ask for a life that required me to repeatedly absorb the impact, figure out what was still usable, and somehow keep moving. I didn’t volunteer for the situations that made resilience necessary. I’d have preferred safety, stability, and support. I’d have preferred things to go smoothly more often than they have. Is that too much to ask for?

There is something genuinely hurtful about being praised for how well you survived what you should never have had to survive. Even the language of “bouncing back” bothers me. Back to what—the person I was before the impact? My original shape, as though I were made of rubber rather than flesh, memory, consequence, and a nervous system altered by experience?

I haven’t always bounced back. Usually, I’ve adapted. Sometimes I’ve rebuilt. Oftentimes I’ve dragged myself forward because stopping wasn’t really an option. Sometimes I’ve reorganized my entire life around injuries nobody else could see. I’ve spent my entire life technically functioning but being quite unwell physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.

We routinely confuse continued productivity with recovery. Someone keeps working, answering messages, caring for other people, making decisions, and paying bills, so we assume they are coping beautifully. Often, they are functioning because the practical world doesn’t suspend its demands while a person falls apart.

Resilience research itself is much more complicated than the popular story that some people are simply stronger than others. There’s evidence that biological differences, genetic influences, early experiences, relationships, available resources, and current environments all contribute to how people respond to adversity. One longitudinal twin study (Amstadter, Myers, & Kendler, 2014) estimated moderate genetic influence on one particular measure of psychiatric resilience, but that doesn’t mean there’s a single resilience gene or that resilience is fixed at birth. It means biology and environment are entangled, the measurements themselves matter, and the science is nowhere near as simple as “strong people overcome things.” Nature and nurture aren’t standing on opposite sides of a courtroom waiting for us to determine which one committed the personality. They’re interacting with each other constantly.

The temperament a child is born with affects how adults respond to that child. Those responses affect the child in turn. Family systems are bidirectional, even though the adults obviously hold more responsibility and power. Children aren’t passive objects into which an environment is poured. They respond, adapt, resist, seek, withdraw, provoke, soothe, and participate in relationships, and those relationships continue shaping everyone involved (Sameroff, 2009). Research on parenting, temperament, and family development has repeatedly had to move away from simple one-way models and toward more transactional ones.

In short, none of us earned the nervous system we entered the world with. We didn’t choose our childhood environments, the resources our families had, the adults responsible for us, the dangers we encountered, or the coping strategies available to us. We didn’t earn a greater or lesser capacity to recover as though resilience were a prize given to people who performed adversity particularly well.

That doesn’t mean we have no agency. It does mean that our agency has conditions. Some people have more room in which to recover. They have money, time, healthcare, secure housing, flexible work, supportive relationships, or a community that catches them before they hit the ground. Other people are repeatedly called resilient because nobody has any intention of offering the material support that would allow them to stop exercising that resilience.

That’s where the compliment begins to rot. “You’re so resilient” can become a socially acceptable way of saying, “We’ve noticed that you can survive without adequate help, and we’d like you to continue doing that.”

Women are particularly vulnerable to this kind of praise. So are queer people, disabled people, poor people, racialized people, caregivers, and anyone else expected to quietly absorb institutional failure while remaining pleasant, useful, and productive.

“You’ve been through so much.”

“You’re so strong.”

“We know you’ll figure it out.”

Which is lovely, except I’d rather you help.

Resilience can begin to resemble a personality partly because other people fucking praise us for it. I understand why we accept the praise. I understand why we might even begin to seek it. Fine. I’m resilient. That’s something I’m good at. Fucking praise me for it. Tell me I’m strong. Tell me I’m remarkable. Tell me there’s at least one thing about me worth admiring. When praise has been scarce, we may take whatever form of it is available. We may begin protecting the very identity that’s exhausting us because it has become evidence that we have value. Maybe we don’t feel beautiful, successful, lovable, easy to be around, or whatever else we’ve been told we should be, but at least we’re strong.

At least we can take a hit. At least we can survive. The trouble is that once people decide you can endure anything, they start behaving as though you should. Your suffering becomes less urgent because you’ve survived before. Your limits are treated like temporary lapses in character. When you finally say that you can’t do something, everyone acts confused because you’ve always managed before.

Sometimes we participate in this as self-flagellation. We refuse rest because needing rest contradicts the identity we’ve built. We remain in impossible situations because leaving feels like failure. We tell ourselves that we’ve survived worse, which may be true but is also a terrible fucking reason to remain somewhere harmful. We keep accepting the next burden because competence is recognizable. At least survival gets applause.

I’m not interested in being praised for how effectively I can withstand preventable harm.

Resilience may be necessary. It may even become a source of knowledge, confidence, power, or solidarity. I’m not dismissing what we’ve learned through survival. But necessity isn’t the same thing as virtue. Survival isn’t consent and I don’t fucking consent to circumstances that continually require me to demonstrate my resilience. I would very much fucking appreciate something to come easily without having to earn it through suffering catastrophe. I’d like support before I reach the point of collapse. I’d like things to go smoothly.

The wheel turns whether we’re ready or not

Of course, things will not always go smoothly. The wheel turns.

There are periods when life feels surprisingly easy, or at least manageable. Then there are periods when every ordinary task requires mind-numbing, insanity provoking negotiation. Even these experiences are relative. Something I can manage when I’m healthy, financially secure, rested, and supported may become impossible when those conditions change. That doesn’t mean I’ve become a worse person. It means circumstances matter.

When I think about the Wheel of Fortune in tarot, I don’t read it as a cheerful little promise that good luck is definitely on the way. Sometimes that’s part of it, but the Wheel is also about contingency. Circumstances change. Positions change. What’s above moves below, and what’s below may rise. Things happen that have absolutely nothing to do with whether we deserve them, whether we’re spiritually evolved, or whether we’ve finally learned the correct lesson. Sometimes the wheel turns because the world turns and this is simply the nature of it.

Bodies become ill, relationships end, jobs disappear, rent rises, governments make cruel decisions, institutions protect themselves, natural disasters hit...the list goes on. People exercise their own agency, generosity, selfishness, wisdom, or breathtaking stupidity. We don’t have much control over any of it, if at all.

That sounds obvious, but a great deal of modern spirituality depends on pretending otherwise. If everything is the result of our mindset, energetic alignment, manifestations, subconscious beliefs, or refusal to “do the work,” then the world becomes controllable. Terrible, maybe, but controllable. It also means that every terrible thing becomes our fault and this is something that I violently reject.

There are things we influence and contribute to. There are patterns we participate in, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not. There are also things that happen because we live inside bodies, systems, histories, relationships, economies, environments, and political structures that don’t rearrange themselves around our personal growth.

No amount of inner work grants total control over what enters our lives, and any spiritual practice shouldn’t require us to pretend otherwise.

The circle, the wheel, and the spiral

The circle, wheel, and spiral share a geometry without carrying the same meaning. A circle returns to its beginning and closes. A wheel turns through changing conditions. A spiral approaches a familiar point again and again without occupying precisely the same position.

Spiral imagery appears across many cultures over time. I’m not going to take a dive into anthropology here. I’m also completely disinterested in taking a five-thousand-year-old carving, stapling a modern self-help slogan to it, and presenting that as recovered ancient wisdom. So I’m using the spiral here interpretively, because it gives me a way to think about repetition without assumptions of stepping back and failure.

There are moments when I find myself facing something painfully familiar. Personally, it’s the times when the same fear crops up, the same desire to be understood by someone committed to misunderstanding me, the same undercurrent in a relationship, and the same questions about safety, belonging, purpose, or power. In these moments, I’ll often think, “For fuck’s sake, am I really here again?! Didn’t I deal with this last time? Why is it happening again? Why don’t I fucking learn?!” See how easy it is to meet these familiar points and see them as steps back? As failure?

The spiral asks me to pause before I call the recurrence a failure. Am I truly in the same place, or have I arrived with different knowledge? Can I recognize and name the pattern more clearly? Do I have language or boundaries that did not exist before? Can I distinguish what belongs to me from what belongs to my family, an institution, a culture, or the person standing across from me?

The spiral doesn’t promise constant improvement. We can move inward as well as outward; we can lose capacity, become less resourced, more frightened, more exhausted, or more constrained. Time doesn’t automatically make us wiser, and pain doesn’t guarantee transformation or elevation. Sometimes something terrible happens, and all we receive from it is the fact that something terrible happened.

What the spiral offers isn’t a promise of progress. It offers the possibility of perspective. I’m not back where I started. I’m encountering something familiar from another perspective. That difference may be enormous, or it may be barely perceptible. It may only be that this time I know what’s happening while it’s happening. Sometimes that’s the beginning of everything.

Returning to the sphere of influence

This brings me to the sphere. Recognizing a pattern isn’t enough. At some point, we have to ask what we can actually do.

When the world feels chaotic, I can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to control what lies well beyond my control. I rehearse conversations in which the other person finally understands; I devise the perfect explanation and imagine the evidence that will make an institution behave ethically. I anticipate every outcome as though vigilance might prevent surprise. It will not. Hypervigilance can resemble responsibility because it keeps me busy, but being busy is not the same as having influence over a single damn thing.

Returning to the self means returning to the inner sphere where discernment and meaningful action are still possible. I may not be able to control whether someone approves of me, but I can decide how much authority I give their approval. I may not be able to force an institution to become ethical, but I may be able to document, report, organize, refuse, leave, expose, or withdraw my labor. I may not be able to make another person communicate honestly, but I can stop doing all the interpretive work required to pretend they are. I may not be able to prevent pain, but I can sometimes decide which pain I’ll continue choosing. I may not be able to repair a relationship alone, but I can stop mistaking my effort for mutuality.

That is the inner sphere: our attention, boundaries, words, choices, refusals, commitments, and labour, as well as where we place our limited time, care, and devotion.

That said, some problems can’t be solved within an individual sphere because they’re produced collectively and structurally. Personal boundaries won’t end medical discrimination, economic exploitation, state violence, workplace abuse, housing insecurity, or misogyny. We can’t journal our way out of material conditions.

What we cannot change individually may still be changed collectively. Our sphere of influence expands when we organize through unions, cooperatives, networks of chosen kin, mutual-aid projects, communities of practice, and systems of collective protection. It expands when we share information, bear witness, refuse together, pool resources, and stop treating every structural failure as a private test of character.

Returning to the self isn’t a retreat from the world. It’s a return to the place from which we decide how we’re going to participate in it.

The question isn’t only “What can I control?”. It’s also, “What can I influence? What can we influence together? Where am I spending energy on an outcome I can’t produce? Where have I confused vigilance with responsibility? Where have I mistaken powerlessness for acceptance? What belongs to the wheel, what belongs to the spiral, and what belongs within my sphere?”

The wheel asks me to acknowledge contingency; the spiral, to recognize repetition and difference; the sphere, to act where action is possible.

As an Inner Workroom subscriber, I’ve created for you a workbook to assist in your journey through the spiral, exploring the concepts written about here, should you choose. It is downloadable content, available here: The Return to Self Spiral Practice Journal | Aster & Ash

Thank you for sharing your space and time with me today.

References

Amstadter AB, Myers JM, Kendler KS. (2014). Psychiatric resilience: Longitudinal twin study. Br J Psychiatry. Oct;205(4):275-80. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.113.130906.

Sameroff, A. (Ed.). (2009). The transactional model of development: How children and contexts shape each other. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/11877-000

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I’d like to welcome you to Monday at the Threshold, Aster & Ash’s openly accessible weekly newsletter. Here, we’ll explore a monthly theme through questions, reflections, and whatever else emerges along the way, with the intention of transforming not only ourselves but also the world immediately around us, the part we can actually reach, influence, challenge, and change.

The turning of the wheel is especially interesting to me right now because it has been spinning hard in my own life, with one massive upheaval after another. None of it has been subtle. At the same time, all of that upheaval is creating a kind of freedom, or at least making room for one, because it is forcing me to listen more closely to the calling that has been getting louder for some time now. The universe has been fairly insistent: You need to be doing this, Astrid. So here I am, and I am inviting you into this space with me.

What you will find here is honesty, transparency, grittiness, and an unashamed exploration of the beauty that can be found in both darkness and light. My own week has been hellacious, to the point that I need the help of my physician, a psychiatrist, and a therapist to help recalibrate what is currently a very dysregulated nervous system and body. I am not pretending otherwise. I am also looking toward the week ahead and hoping that, as I continue moving forward, listening to the universe, and listening to my own intuition, this particular Tower season will eventually come to a close.

You are not going to find toxic positivity here, nor will you find miracle promises about manifesting whatever your heart desires if you think the right thoughts, raise your vibration, and purchase the correct crystal. What you will find is a place where real soul work can occur. There will be honest and sometimes gritty stories from the darker side of life, along with celebration, grief, anger, ambiguity, and the attempt to understand what transformation can come from all of it. I am generally raw, frequently unfiltered, slightly unhinged, and old enough not to give too many fucks about what no longer serves me. I have lived a lot, and I want to share those experiences with whoever may find something in them that is useful, resonant, clarifying, or simply less lonely.

I do not subscribe to one specific spiritual path. I dance along the edges of several, and my belief system is considered taboo by many people. Do I care? Nope. I will not proselytize, and I will not push my beliefs onto anyone, but you are going to hear about them if you choose to read because they are fundamental to how I understand the world and how I live my life. They are part of the looking glass through which I interpret what happens around me. I can be offensive, but I am not intentionally hurtful, and there is a difference. This is my space, and I am inviting you into it. Respectful disagreement is welcome. Disrespect, cruelty, and disruption are not. Anyone who cannot behave respectfully will be escorted out quickly because I have no room left in my life for unnecessary disruption of my peace.

With that said, welcome to Aster & Ash.

You will also see this reminder consistently throughout the publication: I am a woman with nearly five decades of experience on this mortal coil, but I am not a therapist, counselor, physician, or other licensed clinical provider. I do not hold the education or licensure required to claim a clinical skill set, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. This is a space for reflection, thought experiments, spiritual inquiry, shared experience, learning, and growth. Nothing I write here should be taken as medical or mental health advice because it is not intended to be that and should not be used that way. If you are experiencing physical or mental health concerns, please seek care from an appropriate licensed provider.

Aster & Ash is a place for spiritual growth and exploration, but we also believe in science. Science and spirituality are not necessarily enemies, nor are they mutually exclusive. We can remain open to mystery without abandoning evidence, and we can take spiritual experience seriously without making claims we cannot support. So please take care of yourself in evidence-based ways. The universe may have excellent suggestions, but it is not licensed to prescribe clinical care.

This Week: A Return to Self

Jera on art from Maremi’s Illustrationi Collage Epherema: Moss Stories by Marta Lapkowska

This month, we’re exploring a return to self. Each week will have a central theme or question that I’ll be putting to myself, to you, and to the universe.

This week’s theme is The Wheel Turns, which also reminds me that I am still pretty sad The Wheel of Time did not get additional seasons. It is, by far, my favorite fantasy saga of all time, written by two of my favorite authors, and if you have not yet devoted the frankly unreasonable amount of discipline and time required to read all of the novels, are you really living? I’m just saying.

That aside, the wheel turns, and it will always turn. This is the way of life. So the question I’m exploring this week, with myself, with you, and with the universe, is this:

What does it mean to return to yourself when you are no longer the person who left?

And what does that actually mean?

Let’s get into it.

Looking Glass

We live in a society that thinks very linearly. We are born, we move through infancy and early childhood, and so much of who we are going to become is shaped during those first five years or so, at a time when we have absolutely no control over any of it. It depends on the circumstances we are born into. What were our parents like? What was our mother’s health like before we were born? How well did she take care of herself, and what did she ingest while she was pregnant with us? Were we born into poverty or privilege? What geographic area were we born into? Was there poison in the water? Did we grow up in the inner city or on a farm in the country? What were our relationships with our siblings like, and what were our parents’ relationships with each of us? Were we born with congenital conditions that were bound to shape part of who we would become? We had no control over any of that.

Then we move into childhood and begin school, and once again, the quality of what we receive depends heavily on our parents’ income, geographic area, education level, and the resources available within the school district. At that age, we have no fucking control over it. We also have no control over our genetics, how our brains are wired, how we learn, or whether our teachers and educational institutions are equipped to meet our needs. Not every child loves reading fiction. Not every child loves nonfiction. I had one child who could never get into stories but absolutely loved nonfiction. Are we going to fall somewhere on the autism spectrum and end up with a teacher who has no idea what to do with us, even with an individualized education plan, so we spend third grade in the fucking hallway because the teacher cannot manage behavior that disrupts the class? Are we going to have social anxiety and not understand how to make friends? Are the kids in our classes going to be terrible to us? Because kids are mean. Kids can be really fucking terrible. If you are labeled a tomboy, have short orange curly hair, a face full of freckles, and no concept of personal hygiene because your parents never taught you, how is school going to go for you? What control do you have over any of that?

From there, we move through adolescence and high school according to an expected pattern, progressing through each grade level and ultimately graduating. Then we are expected to go to college, learn a trade, pursue some other form of higher education, or immediately begin working full time. After that, we are supposed to find a significant other, move in together, get married, maybe start a family, and then basically work until we die. Sorry, work until we retire, at which point we apparently get another twenty years of fun, easy, breezy, carefree life. Isn’t that the dream? Maybe it is not the reality, but it is the linear life cycle we are expected to follow.

Except life is not a straight line, and time is ultimately far less orderly than we pretend it is. Even as we move through the standard stages of human development, the wheel is always turning. Throughout our lives there will be hard times and easy times, abundance and scarcity, joy and grief, health and illness. There will be times when we completely lose ourselves and then come back to ourselves, and sometimes when we return, we look back and no longer recognize the person who was there at the beginning of the cycle.

What do we do with that? Do we grieve for who we were and are no longer? Do we do what I have been doing lately and look back at who we once were, only to spiral into massive anxiety because we cannot believe what a fucking horrible person we were? Each turn of the wheel is an opportunity for rebirth and renewal, but transformation is not easy. It is fucking terrifying. It is destabilizing. When we no longer recognize the person we were at the beginning of a cycle, our ego may have no framework for how to move forward. It can feel like starting the script again from the beginning, and that is scary and overwhelming. For me, it is extremely anxiety provoking. I am tired of starting over again and again, but I also know this is simply part of being alive. We move through the standard stages of life while the wheel continues to turn beneath us.

We may recognize this more easily in the larger cycles of life. I see many women now in their late forties and fifties who have spent their entire adult lives raising families, and many of them have also spent those years taking care of husbands. I choose the phrase taking care of intentionally because, frankly, that seems to be what a lot of these men have expected and required. Now those women are nearing the end of active parenting as their adolescent children become adults, and they are looking around asking, Who the fuck am I?

They have lost their sense of identity and any clear understanding of who they are authentically because they have spent decades taking care of other people, helping other people discover who they are, and preparing other people to exist in the world. Many of them gave up careers when they entered the cycle of motherhood. Now they are coming out the other side with little recent work experience, little financial independence, and the realization that they have done very little to prepare themselves for stability and success in their own later years. They look back at the twenty-year-old woman who began that cycle of motherhood and parenting, and they do not recognize her. Now they see someone tired, burned out, and sick to the fucking core of meeting everyone else’s needs except her own.

This is often the point when enormous transition begins. Women start thinking more about themselves and less about how they are going to continue taking care of everyone else. The wheel keeps turning, and the question becomes what that turn will mean. Will they remain trapped in a similar cycle, or will they move toward a more authentic version of themselves?

We all have some innate sense of intuition, some ability to listen to our gut, and I think women at this stage often find that their intuition is screaming quite loudly. Sometimes it tells them to leave their husbands. Sometimes they do not take that step, but they begin setting very clear and firm boundaries. In my experience, that often results in an escalation of abuse or in the husband making the marriage so untenable that eventually someone has to leave anyway. Men do not always respond well when the conditions that have privileged them for years begin to change. I am not saying that these men have not worked or contributed to supporting their families, but many of them have also benefited from a level of privilege they choose not to acknowledge.

When women begin setting boundaries with their partners and children, that can mark the beginning of a new cycle. It is fucking terrifying because it upheaves everything. Partners freak out. Children freak out. The whole system reacts because the system was built around one person remaining available, accommodating, and endlessly useful. But setting those boundaries is one of the clearest ways to communicate love, care, and concern for yourself and for other people. Boundaries are healthy. Once those boundaries are in place, women often begin to recover enough mental space and emotional capacity to think about how they actually want to shape the rest of their lives.

One of the traps, though, is looking back at the self who began the cycle and feeling that all the changes were for the worse. We look at our twenty-something-year-old selves and remember how beautiful our skin was, how different our figures looked, how much energy we had, how physically strong or capable we were, and then we look at ourselves now and feel grief. I think it is perfectly acceptable to grieve the passing of youth. Our youth is no longer with us, and there are real losses in that. But we also need to learn how to inhabit and appreciate the bodies we have now.

We may no longer recognize the person we were during the previous cycle, and it is all right to grieve that change, but we cannot live inside the grief. The turn of the wheel is also a new opportunity. Transition can be painful. At some point, I will talk more about spiritual alchemy and the hard work of shadow, but for now, let us simply acknowledge that transformation can be brutal. When I think about butterflies, I cannot imagine that any of them find the process particularly enjoyable or easy. Some of them emerge damaged in ways that are not even conducive to life. I think many of us feel that way when we come through a major transformation, as though we have emerged damaged beyond usefulness. But pain and grief can still be transformed into something that serves us better than endless rumination over everything that happened during the last turn of the wheel.

The wheel turns because turning is its nature. We see cycles everywhere in the earth and throughout the universe. Return is a recurring movement. It is not a backward journey. It is expected. It simply is. We may think of our lives as linear and interpret any return as a step backward, but recurrence is not failure. It is another opportunity for transformation and growth.

In tarot, this is the Wheel of Fortune. Life repeatedly brings us back to the same questions from different levels of experience. That is why it is not a step backward. We may find ourselves in a familiar situation, but we are not the same person we were the last time we encountered it. We have more experience. We have different knowledge. We have probably grown, suffered, learned, or been shaped by circumstances in ways that change how we approach the question now. This is not repetition because we are different and the conditions are different. It is recurrence.

I think most people, if they look back carefully, will find similar themes appearing again and again throughout their lives. How did you approach them each time? What changed when you found yourself in a new turn of the wheel but facing a familiar situation? Returning does not mean you have not grown, and it does not undo the growth you have already done. It presents another opportunity to respond differently, with the hope that the result will serve you better.

When you look back and no longer recognize the person you were at the beginning of the cycle, I encourage you not to become estranged from her. Love her anyway. Exhaustion, upheaval, grief, awakening, illness, and change can estrange us from ourselves, but when you look back and do not recognize her, that may also be an invitation to reconnect. You do not have to become her again because you have changed, but you can integrate her as part of yourself. Maybe she is no longer the most visible part of you. Maybe she is present in the deepened wrinkle of your smile lines or the furrow between your brows. She is still part of you, and that is something to be honored rather than disdained.

What feels like losing ourselves may actually be the dissolution of an identity that no longer fits or serves us well, and that is okay. I am quite glad not to be the person I was in my twenties. I grieve some of what came with youth, especially having a healthier body, being stronger, and feeling more physically capable, but I am deeply grateful for the growth that followed. I am especially grateful for the wisdom and maturity I have gained because I was an extremely stupid and willful twenty-something-year-old, and I am honestly amazed I have made it this far.

Constellations

The Wheel from The Druidcraft Tarot - Author: Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm; illustrated by Will Worthington

The Wheel was old long before tarot ever got hold of it.

In The Consolation of Philosophy, written in the sixth century, Boethius uses Fortune’s Wheel to describe the instability of human circumstances. People rise, reign, fall, and are replaced as the Wheel turns. Fortune’s defining quality is not kindness, justice, or cruelty. It is movement. She does not remain still (Boethius, 1999). Medieval artists made that idea brutally visible, arranging figures around the Wheel as they were lifted, crowned, displaced, and thrown back down again (J. Paul Getty Museum, n.d.).

There is nothing especially comforting about this symbol. It does not tell us that every loss contains a hidden blessing, that suffering is part of some flawless cosmic plan, or that the Wheel will eventually turn in our favor if we remain patient and sufficiently well behaved. It simply refuses the fantasy of permanence. Power changes hands. Health changes. Security disappears. Grief loosens its grip and then sometimes returns wearing another face. Joy arrives, leaves, and arrives again. Nothing stays fixed, although the consequences of those movements are very clearly not distributed equally.

Tarot emerged in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game made up of familiar suits and a set of illustrated trumps. Its association with occult philosophy and divination developed gradually over the centuries rather than being its original, singular, or secret purpose (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016). I think that history makes tarot more interesting, not less. Symbols are not sterile artifacts preserved under glass. They accumulate meaning as they move through different cultures, practices, crises, imaginations, and hands.

In contemporary tarot practice, the Wheel of Fortune may be read as change, recurrence, chance, consequence, fate, or forces that exceed individual control. I do not read it as a cheerful announcement that everything is about to improve. Wheels turn in both directions. Being carried upward does not make anyone morally superior, and being dragged through the dirt beneath the Wheel does not indicate a failure of character. The card is not a gold-foiled promise from the universe. It is orientation. Conditions shift. Control is partial. Where we are now is not where we will always be.

Alongside the Wheel of Fortune, I have included Jera, conventionally identified as the twelfth rune of the Elder Futhark. Jera is a reconstructed name derived from a Germanic root connected to the year, the season, and the harvest. Related forms appear in later traditions, including the Old English gēr and the Old Norse ár (Page, 2006). That linguistic lineage remains visible in the modern English word year.

The Old English Rune Poem describes gēr through the promise of seasonal return and agricultural abundance, a time when the earth yields food for rich and poor alike (Halsall, 1981). The Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems also associate ár with harvest, prosperity, and the fruits of the land (Dickins, 1915). These poems are not an ancient rune-reading handbook, and they do not provide a neat list of divinatory keywords. What they preserve is more useful than that: a recurring field of meaning around season, return, ripening, and harvest.

That distinction matters because the history of runes is routinely flattened into mystical nonsense. The rune poems preserve names and culturally situated images, not a standardized psychological system. Runes were primarily a form of writing, although some inscriptions clearly carried ritual, symbolic, or magical functions. Modern rune divination is therefore a contemporary interpretive practice, not an untouched system passed hand to hand from some imaginary ancient priesthood (Page, 2006).

None of that makes Jera spiritually meaningless. It simply asks us to be honest about what is historical evidence and what is interpretation.

Jera belongs in this inquiry because its oldest associations place it firmly inside cyclical time. A harvest does not happen immediately, and it is never entirely self-authored. It depends on what was planted, how it was tended, the soil in which it grew, the weather it endured, and conditions no individual can fully command. The season arrives on its own terms. What is gathered reflects what came before, but it is never the product of effort alone.

This is where Jera and the Wheel of Fortune diverge in useful ways. The Wheel draws attention to movement, reversal, volatility, and changes that may arrive without warning. Jera is slower. It asks us to look at maturation, recurrence, and consequence unfolding over time. The Wheel turns. Jera ripens.

That does not mean Jera guarantees a reward for hard work. I reject that interpretation because it collapses too easily into the cruel mythology that everyone receives exactly what they deserve. Crops fail. Bodies break. Systems exploit. Weather destroys what was carefully tended. Structural inequality determines who has access to land, safety, time, resources, and the right to keep what they have grown. Jera is most useful when it helps us think about timing, labor, conditions, relationship, and consequence, not when it is turned into spiritualized meritocracy.

Research on human development also pushes back against the idea that life unfolds as a clean and orderly progression. Life-course theory understands development as a lifelong process shaped by historical time and place, the timing of events, relationships, human agency, and the opportunities and constraints built into social structures (Elder, 1998). We make choices, but we never make them in a vacuum. Poverty, geography, gender, health, education, work, family responsibility, discrimination, and historical circumstance all shape which choices are available in the first place.

Our sense of self changes as well. Psychologists use the term narrative identity to describe the evolving story through which we connect a reconstructed past with an imagined future. That story gives us some continuity, but it does not require us to remain psychologically identical to every earlier version of ourselves (McAdams & McLean, 2013). We keep revising the story because we keep changing, and because the meaning of what happened to us often changes as we gain distance, knowledge, and language.

This is where the Wheel of Fortune and Jera begin to speak to each other.

A linear view of life tells us that return is failure: I am here again, so apparently I learned nothing. Cyclical symbols offer a more honest possibility. We can return to a familiar question without returning as the same person. The circumstances may resemble something we have lived before, but we arrive with different knowledge, different wounds, different resources, different limits, and perhaps a little less tolerance for bullshit.

That is not repetition. It is recurrence.

The Wheel of Fortune tells me that circumstances move whether I am ready or not. Jera tells me that some changes need time to ripen before I can understand what they have produced. Neither promises ease, fairness, or resolution. Neither insists that every loss will eventually reveal itself as a gift.

Together, they ask a more difficult question than whether we have arrived somewhere familiar:

What has matured, what has been lost, and what has changed in the person who has returned?

Your Turn:

Where in my life does something appear to be repeating, and what has changed in me since the last time I stood here?

- You

Share your reflections with Aster & Ash for potential publication in future issues. We want to hear from you!

References

Boethius. (1999). The consolation of philosophy (V. E. Watts, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published ca. 524)

Dickins, B. (Ed. & Trans.). (1915). Runic and heroic poems of the old Teutonic peoples. Cambridge University Press.

Elder, G. H., Jr. (1998). The life course as developmental theory. Child Development, 69(1), 1–12.

Halsall, M. (1981). The Old English Rune Poem: A critical edition. University of Toronto Press.

J. Paul Getty Museum. (n.d.). The wheel of fortune. The J. Paul Getty Museum.

McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2016). Before fortune-telling: The history and structure of tarot cards. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Page, R. I. (2006). An introduction to English runes (2nd ed.). Boydell Press.

What’s Coming Next

Aster & Ash is beginning as a fully openly accessible publication, but it will not remain limited to the weekly newsletter alone. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be opening additional spaces for readers who want to go deeper into the work, receive more substantial resources, or participate in the more tangible and communal parts of what I’m building.

Monday at the Threshold will remain the free weekly newsletter and the central public offering. Each month will have a guiding theme, and each Monday we’ll approach that theme through a different question, drawing from lived experience, spiritual practice, research, history, symbolism, and whatever remains unresolved. The goal is not to hand down answers from the mountaintop. It is to create a place where we can think more honestly, examine the patterns shaping our lives, and consider what transformation might actually require from us.

The first community tarot, oracle, and rune reading will be published later this week. These readings will also remain freely available. They will not be individualized predictions or instructions from the universe about whether you should quit your job, marry the stranger from the internet, or invest your retirement savings in something with “moon” in the name. They will be collective readings offered for reflection, discernment, and conversation. I’ll share the layout, walk through the symbols and relationships I see, and invite readers to consider what resonates, what complicates the message, and what may be asking for their attention.

For readers who want to move further into the practice, I’ll be opening The Inner Workroom. This will be the deeper digital membership space, with more substantial essays, annotated rituals, writing and reflection exercises, workbooks, audio reflections, research notes, and behind-the-scenes exploration of how I develop the material shared here. Some weeks that may take the form of a full essay or guide. Other weeks it may be a field note, a reading list, an audio reflection, or a smaller practice intended to be used rather than merely consumed. Paid material will offer greater depth and additional tools; it will not be the missing half of an idea I deliberately amputated to force people behind a paywall.

The Black Lantern will include everything offered through the Inner Workroom, along with a monthly physical mailing. Each month, members will receive a letter from Aster & Ash accompanied by an original sigil, small artwork, ritual card, or another piece created around that month’s theme. These will be designed for the subscriber community as a whole rather than individually commissioned for each person, but they will be personal, intentional, and made to exist outside the endless churn of screens. I have a post office box for correspondence as well, so this can eventually become something reciprocal rather than a mysterious envelope appearing from the void once a month.

You will also begin seeing work connected to the Medusa Society, which is developing as a related but distinct community project centered on women supporting women, reclaiming collective power, recovering neglected histories, and creating material forms of mutual aid and solidarity. Some Medusa Society writing and public invitations will remain freely available because I am not interested in building a movement that requires a subscription fee to enter the room. More detailed organizing resources, facilitation materials, archival notes, and strategy work may appear through the Inner Workroom and Black Lantern.

For August, everything will grow from our first monthly theme: The Return to Self. Alongside Monday at the Threshold, you can expect the first community reading, a deeper Workroom feature, an introductory Medusa Society dispatch, and the beginning of the Black Lantern mailing process. I am building this deliberately rather than releasing twelve new offerings at once and immediately becoming the exhausted administrator of my own liberation project.

More details about membership, timing, and the first physical mailing will be available soon. For now, the wheel is turning, the doors are opening, and I am very glad you are here at the beginning.

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